Genocide: India Shining

Listening To Grasshoppers by Arundhati Roy

I've cobbled together something from this essay, as well as from another unrelated interview... I think it works as a preview to Roy's position on the Indian civil war:

"While our economists number-crunch and boast about the growth rate, a million people — human scavengers — earn their living carrying several kilos of other people’s shit on their heads every day. And if they didn’t carry shit on their heads they would starve to death. Some fucking superpower, this.
...
The poor, the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or to succumb. [Bollywood star Amitabh] Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the world’s not looking. Not to where he thinks, but across another ravine, to another side. The side of armed struggle. From there they look back at the ... Tsars of Development and mimic their regretful slogan: ‘There Is No Alternative.’

They have watched the great Gandhian people’s movements being reduced and humiliated, floundering in the quagmire of court cases, hunger strikes and counter-hunger strikes. Perhaps these many million Constraining Ghosts of the Past wonder what advice Gandhi would have given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves of Africa, the Tasmanians, the Herero, the Hottentots, the Armenians, the Jews of Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps they wonder how they can go on hunger strike when they’re already starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they have no money to buy any goods. How they can refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings.
...
Of course it’s horrible that ... policemen [are] killed. But they’re as much the victims of government policy as anybody else. For the government and the corporations they’re just cannon fodder — there’s plenty more where they came from. Crocodile tears will be shed, prim TV anchors will hector us for a while and then more supplies of fodder will be arranged. For the Maoist guerrillas, the police and spos they killed were the armed personnel of the Indian State, the main, hands-on perpetrators of repression, torture, custodial killings, false encounters. They’re not innocent civilians — if such a thing exists — by any stretch of imagination."

Schooling a teabagger

Robert Reich Public Option Video

Robert Reich speaks directly on what the 'public option' is and why it is so important to health care reform.

N

How is a public option, which takes money in the form of taxes, and then gives it away in the form of bureaucratic health care, not socialism?

Oh -- and does it matter that a federal health care plan is unconstitutional?

J

I understand the fear, but aren't our soldiers given a public healthcare that comes from our taxes? Aren't our fire and police departments paid for out of our taxes? Would you decry these institutions and call them socialism?

If not, then why would you deprive me, a citizen of this country, the ability to have heathcare (which I can't afford...)?

Doesn't it say "do unto others as you would have them do unto you?" Then why allow people to die because big business (not big government) choses who will live and who will die? Every person in this country has the right to live, and a corporation choosing who will get heathcare and who will not (either thru financial realities, or preexisting conditions) is not just. We live in a free country, and our healthcare should be a right, not a luxury.

P

Wow J! I wish I had restraint like that ;)

K

nicely said!

N

You're not deprived from having healthcare -- you're just deprived from forcing others to pay for your healthcare.

Who made health care a right? Is food a right? Is the internet a right? When did it become a right to steal the bread of the laborer? Where does it say that in the constitution? Who defines who has what rights? If the majority decides on a "right," does their decree supersede the rights of the individual? If the majority decides that we should have the "right" to live in this country without hearing speech we don't like, can we then silence the minority?

Freedom means the right to own your own property and the bread you yourself make, and the right to choose what doctor and what procedures you want -- not have them dictated to you by some idiot bureaucrat.

C

We should also abolish police departments so people who can afford private security aren't forced to pay for the safety of everyone else. And the department of transportation, so people who don't drive aren't forced to pay for roads. And I'm pretty sure your high school diploma isn't valid, because people who sent their kids to private school were forced to pay for it.

P

"Owning" your own property means bupkis without a government with courts and police to enforce your property claims. And why do you have a "right" to the bread you yourself make? That makes perfect sense in a hunter-gatherer community, but in a large, complex civilization, you don't make bread. You might put flour and water and yeast together and put it in an oven, but the flour, water, yeast, oven, energy, etc., were "made" by thousands of other people. You have a claim to the bread you "make" because of a social contract that binds all of the thousands of joint producers together, and sets the terms of exchange.

Your underlying philosophical premises are absurd, which is why the arguments you build upon them are so easy to tear apart with a reductio ad absurdum - which is what C just did. The problem is, you arbitrarily (and implicitly) pick some random things and say the costs for these should be shared by society - and demand that the costs for other random things should be borne by individuals as they choose.

Ultimately, you are stuck with this ridicule-worthy point of view because it is the best thing the marketing and public relations people working for the "health care" industry could come up with. You now believe it, because they have successfully spread it throughout the portion of the population susceptible to conservative-sounding ideas. Unless you actually own a significant amount of wealth in the "health care" industry, and so benefit from the status quo, you are essentially being skull-fucked by the profiteers of our anachronistic, anarchic system.

N

It's just as easy to call you absurd. You're on the fringe -- you're a statist -- you apparently believe in a totalitarian utopia. Why don't you move to France where you don't have to work to keep your job? You apparently believe that the government owns our property. When I buy my bread, no one is forcing them to provide it to me. I'm giving them something in return. The market place is all about the free will. The government is all about controlling what you get or what your options are. You're the one who apparently believes in a primitive feudal economy, where we are all servants to our leaders who protect and provide for us.

Yes, we need the police and courts to defend property rights. But they should only need to enforce laws which are fair, just, and equitable, and respect the individual rights of people as defined by the constitution. But you don't believe in that apparently. You believe in tyranny -- as sold to you by the power-hungry state-run media we have today.

P

I would move to France but for their protectionist immigration laws that, just like in the U.S., keep wages artificially high by preventing a free market in labor from equalizing wages across the world.

By the way, I didn't just call you absurd - I went to lengths to demonstrate that your position is absurd. On a couple of levels. It's absurd on its face, but it's doubly absurd - assuming you aren't an heir to an insurance company fortune - because it conflicts with your interests while corresponding to the interests of the few who profit from our dysfunctional "system".

C

I'm still trying to figure out the role of government here. It's the government's responsibility to tell people who they can and can't marry, but not to provide an option to heal the sick and injured among its citizens, do I have that right?

P

By the way, I didn't state any of my beliefs, I only demonstrated why the beliefs you stated are ridiculous. You attempted to guess at my beliefs, and failed with near perfection.

N

You haven't really argued your point at all. You don't say anything to me that demonstrates that it's in my interest to go to the government for my health care instead of an insurance plan that I choose and pay for.

Right now I can go see whatever doctor I want, and my privately funded insurance plan will pay for it, as long as I've met my deductible. Do you honestly believe the government "insurance plan" will provide that for me?

I agree that we should allow more legal immigration into this country.

This plan is also unconstitutional, because it violates the whole concept layed out there that the federal government is only allowed to be involved in certain activities, such as national defense and managing the mint.

P

Not going to get into the constitution, except to say that we shouldn't treat it like the Koran: divine revelation that got it right the first time and doesn't need to be changed. Or the Bible.

I'm not arguing my point because I haven't the time or interest. Suffice it to say that if you educated yourself about how civilized countries arrange their health care systems, you'd understand why a public health care system is in your interest. That is, assuming you aren't in the top 5-10% of wealth holders. If that were the case, naturally, you are better off in a system where the masses are abused for the benefit of a few. If you get off on that kind of system, by the way, you would love India.

"Enlightenment is the emergence of a person from self-inflicted immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's understanding without another's guidance. This immaturity is self-inflicted if it is caused not by a feeble understanding, but by lack of resolution and courage. Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding!" - Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784)

N

If you're calling me immature -- you're a hypocrite! You're the one who is such a baby, such a child -- that you as an able adult want other people to be forced to take care of you. You apparently want a nanny state where all of your needs are guaranteed. What's next after universal healthcare? Universal food? Then I suppose you'll want me to feed you your food as well as be forced to give you a physical?? (At gunpoint, because if I don't pay my taxes I get arrested). It sounds like you're pretty wussy if you're not even grown up enough to want to rely on your own abilities to take care of yourself.

P

I'm showing the uncomfortable parallel between Kant's definition of immaturity and your thinking. Although a major difference is that you lack knowledge - for instance, about the public health care systems of every other industrialized country on the planet - not necessarily courage.

For the record, I don't think health care is either a right or a privilege. Rather, it is a good that we as a society could provide for everyone. It is well within the realm of possibility, and I strongly believe we should provide it. Likewise, I strongly believe we should provide the good of universal education. We could of course do without a public school system, and let those who can afford it pay for their own kids to go to a private school. This would leave millions of children uneducated however, through no fault of their own.

Public education and public health both have huge positive externalities or spillover benefits; who wouldn't want to live in a country with educated and healthy people, rather than a country with a large uneducated population with no health care?

At any rate, as young, healthy males, you and I have no problem providing for ourselves. But I have enough foresight to want a safety net in case I lose my health, job and the insurance attached to it (or the income needed to pay for an independent plan); I have enough compassion to want the same for everyone, including those not as able-bodied or otherwise fortunate as myself; and I have enough knowledge about the world to understand that universal, public health care systems work much better than the present anarchic, archaic "system" you are implicitly if not explicitly defending thanks to the "health care" industry's many well-spent public relations dollars.

N

I have enough charity to give a large percentage of my income to help those who are in need in such situation. It's not charity to be forced to provide the care through taxation. I feel good after I perform a voluntary act of charity and good about myself, but I hate tax day. If it's so wonderful to be forced to give welfare or healthcare through the government, why isn't tax a happy day like it is when you do a charitble [sic] act?

In other words, I feel like for every dollar the government forcibly takes from me for public welfare, it takes away another opportunity for me feel good by voluntarily giving it someone in need, like someone who has cancer and needs help paying the hospital bills.

If the U.K. style health care system is wonderful, why do the poor (those that can't afford the black market), still wait and die in queues there waiting for life saving treatments?

P

Again, your ignorance is painfully obvious: the UK has better health outcomes than we do - this despite a shitty cuisine and weather. Not to mention a greater fondness for binge drinking and petty violence.

And your generosity is commendable, if not your motives. Personally, I would not want to be handed charity from someone I know in a time of need - I'd rather that which you consider charity be rather part of standard social services to which I am entitled, and for which I paid my taxes for. If you have ever been the recipient of charity, you would know that the giver's good feelings come at the expense of the recipient's pride.

And tax day for me isn't happy, because I know that over 50% of the discretionary budget of this country is devoted to killing.

N

Yes -- there is a certain natural human desire to provide for ones self.

I am aware that some other countries have better longevity and infant mortality rates than the U.S. You naively assume ignorance simply because I haven't pointed out every fact you happen to know or believe you know about the European system. These statistics may be because people here are free to make their own choices about whether they want an annual checkup and whether they want to pay for it. Even if tyranny result in better longevity, I would rather die a year or two earlier and be free than to live my whole life under healthcare (national socialist or Nazi) tyranny. The quality of my life matters as well as the quantity. I'm happier in our system than I would be in the U.K. I relish my power as a consumer to decide my own fate. You have the same power to decide yours, yet you seek to deprive all of us of basic human rights, the right to keep that which we earn and not have it stolen from us.

"There is a fundamental difference between healthcare and defense. Healthcare can be efficiently provided for voluntarily by society (rather than the government), defense cannot. Defense is ineffective without central command and control. Healthcare thrives without central control.

The primary role of the government is to protect our rights from being usurped by others, not to "provide" for us. The writings of the founding fathers seem quite clear on this. Rights are given by God, not by the government. Life and liberty are God-given rights, because left alone, we would have life and liberty. Healthcare is not a God-given right, because it requires the service of others. If healthcare was a basic right ensured by the constitution, why did it take more than 200 years to recognize it as such?

Yes, society has an obligation to care for the poor and provide healthcare. Government has no such obligation. Two separate things IMO."

That last quote was by my friend J. He just put it on another link.

Maybe people don't see the doctor voluntarily as much as they should, or exercise as much as they should like they are trying to force people in the U.K. But once a person is sick, I believe we do a much better job. Compare these prostate cancer 5 year survival rates:

U.S. -- near 100%
http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/survival/

U.K. -- much lower, even though they should presumably have access to the same technology and you insinuated that they are somehow more civilized than we are in Europe:

http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/survival/

So your saying that your motives in forcing others to pay for your healthcare are more noble than my motives in wanting to freely give to those in need? If so -- that doesn't make any sense to me.

The defense budget is not devoted to killing. It is devoted to the prevention of the killing of Americans, and to some extent the killing of others as we come to the defense of other free societies. Also -- it prevents killing because nobody wants to go head to head with us anymore, so they don't even try. Casualties today are at incredibly low on both sides of the war compared to what they were when our military was more comparable to the rest of the worlds. But, if you don't believe in defending a free society against those who would inflict tyranny on us, I could see why you would be in favor of weakening our military.

The military only makes up about 21% of the U.S. budget. Twice as much is engaged in unconstitutional programs started by FDR and Lyndon Johnson.

N

If you don't like the constitution as written, you should seek to change it first through the democratic process.

J

well, friends... i'm glad to see that a little facebook post can garnish some truly agitated discussion.

May I throw a bit of civility into this discussion-- because while both of you do remain on the outermost fray of your respective sides, these fundamentalist thoughts (and name calling) aren't going to help us solve the larger crises of our time-- namely budget problems (which, N, is inexcusably linked to our heathcare problems... and our defense budget).

There is absolutely nothing UNCONSTITUTIONAL about helping your fellow man-- this is right to Life, Liberty, and Justice as I understand it-- and I hope you both agree on that. The 21st century presents us with a challenging question of how to supply that, because of the damaging nature of a capitalism that runs well over the common man in search of another buck.

J

While N, you may be the most altruistic human on the planet and give throughly to the arts, sciences etc., but I highly doubt that whatever money you have/make is enough to supply for those truly in need (namely those who are either forced out of work by the bureaucrats who decided to tax the poor and give to the rich, as the last administration was so fond of doing, or those forced under due to illness).

To say that it is unconstitutional is to be ungodly in your definition... and I suspect that is something you don't want to be. The debate we are having IS the change we seek thru the democratic process, and as Obama said-- if you present a better idea, he will listen (much to the chagrin of many people on the lef. In the first decade of the 21st century, it's actually one of the few times the democratic process seems to be moving forward (albeit slowly and irrationally, as we are pushed to petty insults (read: this thread) or in congress (read a Joe Wilson (R; s carolina)).

J

I encourage the debate to continue, but don't allow the entrenched thoughts cloud the real challenge of what we need to accomplish-- real reform that allows for every human being to live by those glorious words-- with Life, Liberty, and Justice for all.

P

Depends on what spectrum you are looking at - if you were looking at an international spectrum of political opinion, I'm smack in the center, while N would be off the charts to the right. Even conservatives in Britain don't dream of abandoning their system of socialized medicine. (Socialized medicine is where the government operates the major part of the health care system, while single-payer systems are where the government is the sole insurer and purchaser of medical services, but the providers tend to be privately owned.)

Then again, looking at an international spectrum of opinion, the U.S. is quite the hermit kingdom, home to quacks and wackos of all kinds. Our "left", if exemplified by the New York Times, would be center-right (politically) from an international perspective.

P

Minus the qualifiers - which I would point out were added by every single belligerent country over the past millennium at least, so you can guess at how valid they are (hint: probably not very) - you were forced by reality to concede that the military portion of the budget is for killing; allow reality to force you to concede the correct percentage as well: http://tinyurl.com/llpc44 ... CDI's figures exclude trust fund spending, as the US government used to do back before 1964, when to evade criticism of its war spending Johnson watered down the official budget with a little good ol' American accounting ingenuity.

P

By the way, merely asserting something does not constitute an effective argument. Stating that the military should be provided by society as a whole through its government, but health care should not - because one asserts it is done effectively through the market (it is not: http://tinyurl.com/6xnebm ) - is of equal validity to my claim that I am the world's greatest basketball player.

Still more absurd is your desperate attempt to provide an evidentiary basis for your assertion by cherry-picking one disease the health outcomes of which are better in the U.S. than Britain. Analogy: I am the greatest basketball player in the world, because I have won many games in the U.S., and in Israel. (Actually, my analogy is inapt insofar as I provided two examples to your one.) Read this report, or skip to page 155 at least: http://tinyurl.com/yrsbb8

N

J -- I would be interested in getting your reaction to this article (I'm not trying to convince you of anything):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574402591116901498.html

Full disclosure -- I like Jews and how bright they generally seem to be, and I think we should help defend Israel and allow it to use a united Jerusalem as their capital.

I guess we have a fundamental difference of opinion about what this country is about: I believe it should be a beacon of freedom, and capitalism is one manifestation of that. You seem to believe that this freedom is oppressive. I don't see how me buying private health insurance oppresses or how my insurance company oppresses anyone else. They are not forcing anyone into their plan, nor should they be forced to insure you if they don't want to. Likewise, Doctors should not lose their freedom to treat whom they will.

P

Better to ask why some Jews (like Podhoretz) are reactionaries... I'd surmise that century after century of being at the bottom end of European societies' (not to mention the U.S.) totem poles being ostracized, excluded and hated, shaped Jewish thought such that it tended to focus on and champion the rights of the underdog, the poor, weak, oppressed. Hence the long tradition and prominence of social justice among Jewish intellectuals. Like that Jewish guy... what's his name... Jesus. Whom you purportedly follow, right? The guy that railed against the rich whenever he had a chance...

There is freedom to, and freedom from. Being relatively well off, you cherish the freedom to do or not do as you wish. Most people in this world, however, would love to have the freedom from hunger, sickness, homelessness, exploitation, etc. that you already enjoy, and don't give a damn about the freedom to own a printing press, freedom to choose which insurance to buy at $5,000 a year, freedom to drive a Hummer - freedoms which are completely illusory, even if formally granted - for the vast, vast majority of people on this earth.

N

So you're saying that the money I've rightly earned through hard work was somehow gotten at the expense of others? How does me earning money somehow impede the freedom of others?

P

It might seem incomprehensible to you now, but it won't after reading a book by Immanuel Wallerstein or others on world systems theory (like Introduction to World Systems Theory by Wallerstein), or the history of the world economy - particularly on the continuity of exploitation from colonial times to the present. Check out Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano and Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism. The former is really impassioned and easily readable, the latter is drier (written by an economist who worked for Chase and now consults for governments... yawn) but the subject matter is fascinating.

N

I'm not interested in what they theorized on the macro level. I want you to tell me how I am exploiting others by working hard and having control over the fruits of my labor?

P

That's a bit difficult for me to explain, and for you to understand. Like explaining how the lighting in a movie was really well done, starting from how electrons were emitted from the excited atoms comprising the filament in one of the bulbs used to illuminate one of the scenes in the movie...

But here's a sample. And I'll again encourage you to check out the books I recommended for a macro understanding.

You work at a job making considerably more money than a free market would dictate, thanks to the protectionist immigration laws the U.S. government has in place. If you are a doctor, you are protected from reams of Indian and South American doctors who would otherwise move here in droves to take advantage of our higher wages, eventually driving them down as the increased demand in their countries drives wages there up, finally reaching an international level that is much lower than the current level in the (highly protected) U.S. Same goes for just about any job, not just high skill or low skill professions.

With your inflated paycheck, you can now buy any number of goods imported from other countries. And not only is your paycheck inflated, but the value of the currency your paycheck is denominated in is inflated as well. Ever since the first Bretton Woods agreements, and owing to the destruction of the rest of the industrialized world during WWII, the U.S. dollar has been the word's key currency, in which most commodities are traded and most savings are denominated. After the U.S. reneged on its promise to freely convert $35 for an ounce of gold due to the budgetary strain of the war on Vietnam, the dollar became a fiat currency. Today, despite recurring and ever increasing trade and budget deficits, the value of the dollar hasn't plummeted - contrary to what orthodox economic theory would predict, and to what would happen to any other country's currency if that country followed the same "irresponsible" fiscal and trade policies.

Due to a number of factors, among them path dependence, China's export-led development strategy, U.S. military hegemony, and the oil-for-debt deal made between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in the 70s, your inflated paycheck contains inflated dollars, so when you buy a clock made in China the purchase is doubly unfair already, from the get-go. You are trading a miniscule amount of your labor for a relatively substantial amount of labor from a man or woman in China. The trade is already distorted by immigration laws that prevent the international equalization of wages, and by the overvaluation of the US dollar.

But, you say, the Chinese factory worker, or the Indonesian sweatshop worker, or the Mexican peasant, etc., I buy my clock, pants, or oranges from is free to refuse to enter into this deal with me. Yes - but "free" in a sense so meaningless as to be absurd. Free to engage in this deal, or starve to death, along with his/her family. But you say, Nick Kristoff from the NYT says that sweatshop jobs are better than nothing for the workers so employed, so we shouldn't disparage them?

Yes, but Nick is ignorant of the economic history - apologies, another macro concept - that puts peasants in the position of having to choose an empty stomach or a sweatshop, a history that begins with colonial powers forcing peasants off of their land, making subsistence farming impossible (though it had been quite possible, in fact the norm for most of the period of human civilization), and creating a large surplus army of landless laborers that can be exploited for either plantation monoculture or urban factory work. A process that operates even today.

Hence by getting your inflated paycheck, denominated in inflated dollars, and using that money to buy goods from other countries, you are in effect exchanging an unfairly small amount of your labor for an unfairly large amount of others' labor. A trade which would never be made between you and anyone free to set their own terms, or even free to reject such an unfair trade.

Fin.

N

Ok. I agree that the U.S. labor market is protectionist, and I would be in favor of opening the borders to vastly expanded legal immigration. I think the real reason people view immigration as a bad thing is because of welfare, so to do so we would need to reduce welfare. The Roman Empire had the same problem -- at first immigration was viewed as a good thing -- but then it became a bad thing with free bread and circuses, until this anti-"barbarian" stance eventually overthrew the empire.

You don't address the fact that protectionist labor or import policies drive up consumer prices incredibly in this country -- my so-called inflated paycheck won't by as many goods or services in this country as it would in others.

I think that I would still prosper in such an environment, but my guess would be that you would still view me as somehow exploiting others and that my prosperity would be found at the expense of others.

Your propensity for insulting my intelligence because I have different political views than you is foolish, especially considering that you probably have no clue what my academic qualifications are. If you want to be a persuasive writer, start by not insulting your audience.

So -- I wonder what you think is the difference between an "exploited" worker, and a non-exploited worker? Just because one person has a higher than average income, how is not exploited if he believes his long hours are not fairly compensated? Maybe this higher-paid worker feels that he is forced to work instead of not working so that his large family and those he helps via charity don't starve.

I could argue just as easily that those receiving social security or medicare payments out of my paycheck are exploiting me and my hard work, except I have a gun to my head, and the worker in a supposed sweatshop does not.

Yes -- the sweatshop worker has to work to survive, but don't we all. If they don't like their job and want a better one, why don't they start another business -- become the employer themselves? With microloan charities, such an enterprise is definitely possible. Maybe it's because their government, through onerous regulations and taxes, makes it very difficult to start and run a business in their country. It seems to me that these so-called sweatshops are usually located in societies which have less economic freedom, more regulation, higher taxes, and are often undemocratic.

That's why we should help such countries, encourage them to have more freedom so that they can be free to lift themselves out of poverty. I would also contribute to charities which help teach such entreprenurial skills to people.

Access to freedom (and by extension capitalism) helps people orders of magnitude more than any form of government dole could ever do.

P

Like I said, read the books. Like I said, it is difficult to explain from a micro perspective what are better viewed as macro phenomena. I have little idea of your intelligence, but copious evidence of the insufficiency of your knowledge. Two separate things, my friend. If you memorized the phone books in every county in this country, I'd consider you the most intelligent person of whom I'm aware - and a complete fucking moron, if the contents of those books were all the knowledge you had.

Likewise if you memorized the holy books of every religion ever - or the complete works of the Chicago school neoclassical economists. Who have clearly influenced you.

I don't care one whit about your "academic qualifications". You need to educate yourself out of the black hole you are in, with such utterly foolish thoughts as 'economic freedom allows countries to lift themselves out of poverty'.

Believing that might have excusable - although still bacterium-level stupid - ten years ago, back when "academically qualified" people across the world were treating Tom Friedman's Flathead book and the ideas therein like Holy Writ, but today it is clear to everyone with open eyes connecting to a functioning brain that neoliberalism is terribly, horribly wrong. To continue to espouse ideas so paleolithic is pathological.

And before you think that my vitriol is out of place, or I'm being cynical, or mean, and my vehemence is out of all proportion to the topic at hand, know this: neoliberalism has been implemented throughout the world on a scale unprecedented for any other economic ideology. The results have not been completely tallied. We know that 2 million people died prematurely in Russia after its transition to neoliberalism; we know that growth rates in Africa and Latin America since the 1980s, when neoliberalism first began to be implemented, have been significantly lower than in the decades immediately prior - while in Asia, led by non-neoliberal China and the Tigers, growth rates have not suffered.

Most tellingly, perhaps, we know that around 30,000 children - just children - die every single day (want to guess how many died just as I have been writing?) from malnutrition and hunger. We also know that there is no shortage of food on the planet. Ergo, 30,000 children die every day because of the distribution and allotment of goods, that is, the economy, that is, our system of economic organization - a system which, looked at on a worldwide basis, can only be described as neoliberal capitalist. So think about that when your feelings get hurt because you feel that I am insulting your intelligence.

And what really tickles me is that the only time you can get yourself to agree with me is when I use the magic word "protectionist", which, as every educated person has been taught - in accordance with neoliberal ideology - means "bad". Or perhaps the Orwellian "not good" would be more appropriate.

N

You obviously don't want to have a rational debate if you assume that you're smarter or more knowledgeable if you agree with your political views. It seems arrogant and foolish to me.

Maybe you aspire to be in the communist upper class where you get to be the effective wealthy in your country that gets to decide how everyone else's wealth is redistributed. If so, I can understand why you would want to live in such a system. Otherwise, I can't believe you would aspire to live in the squalor of the common man in communist Russia where you have to wait in line for your daily bread because you're not allowed to trade and barter like you can in a free country.

If that is your utopia, I hope you go somewhere else to try it. I hope you go oppress some other people, because we don't want it in our free country. And if so -- if you're an enemy of freedom -- then so be it. We will fight and win, because this is America, the greatest country to ever be created, and its freedoms deserve to be protected, defended, so that we can live our lives as we see fit instead of under the thumbs of tyrants like you.

I hope you, Obama, and everyone else in the liberal wing of politics fails at what they are doing, because they are studying and seeking to destroy our freedom, to live, work, prosper, worship, and rear our families as we see fit.

You would have your government be your family that you can depend on -- well I prefer my family, and to depend on them when I need help -- they're a lot nicer than some dolt of a government bureaucrat or communist dictator could ever be.

If it comes down to it -- if it comes to war with those that seek to destroy our freedom to live as we live, then so be it. But we will win, if our cause is just, and if we repent and serve God.

God always supports and defends the cause of freedom, if the people will repent and serve Him, and I believe He will uphold us if it comes down to fighting tyrants like you.

P

You are out of your bleeding mind. Not only because you believe in an invisible, omnipotent man in the sky who will send those of his children who displease him to be burned and tortured and stabbed and flayed and choked for all eternity - and who loves us infinitely - but because you think I am a wannabe tyrant. Which is somewhat crazy to begin with, given that I have evinced zero desire to dominate and control, and much empathy with my fellow humans.

But what makes it pure batshit bonkers is that your belief arises from the fact that you seem to think that neoliberal or laissez faire capitalism is at one end of a political spectrum, and iron-fisted Stalinism is at the other. I can think of no other reason for you imagining me to be a wannabe tyrant.

Like libertarians - who are just poorly-read anarchists - you seem to think that a world dominated by un-elected businessmen - who, in the absence of governmental control would inevitably create monopoly after monopoly - would be the epitome of freedom.

I, on the other hand, want to see democracy strengthened, and democratic control extended, beyond merely certain government offices to the economy as a whole. I despise tyrannies, such as constitute every single business in the world in which workers have no say over the direction of the enterprise of which they are a part. You, however, are blind to the power of the unelected, illegitimate, unrepresentative neo-feudal lords who control groups of producers and tools we call corporations.

You are immature, according to Kant's definition, for failing to take the initiative to question your society's conventions - and this explains your blindness to that which should make you indignant - in this case, economic tyrannies - given your professed commitment to freedom.

N

You would forcibly take my money from me to do what you think you would do best with it against my will. That is the same type tyranny that the revolutionaries fought against. Because you would glut yourself and others on my labor, and seek authority over me to force me to live my life how you see fit -- that makes you an aspiring tyrant in my mind... Read More.

And about God -- and the belief in Him being crazy -- you have no evidence that he does not exist. You cannot prove his non-existence through your intellectual arguments. You can only assert your belief in His nonexistence.

And I do not believe in oppressing other religions though force -- and neither does God. That is why He loves and supports freedom.

In terms of tyranny -- the difference between me and you -- is that I believe the misuse of force by the government to force benevolence on people is tyranny, whereas you seem to believe that people voluntarily (without force) coming together to run a company is force. And you seek to prove that that voluntary enterprise is forced through your ... Read Moremacroeconomics nonsense arguments. You are a communist, it seems, and therefore you would seek to oppress others. Communism is forced and tyrannical, capitalism is evidence of freedom.

P

To pick just one example of your poor reasoning would admittedly be arbitrary and incomplete, but I'll do it anyway: it is nearly impossible to prove a negative. Why don't you prove that the last pair of shoes I wore are in fact omnipotent and omniscient, and are invisibly orbiting the moon, from where they control all events on the planet?

That's the point of this important site: http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/  After all, Glenn Beck has yet to disprove these serious allegations...
 

And one more example of pervasive, flawed reasoning: you merely assert, when the burden upon you is to prove, or disprove.

N

To me there is plenty of proof that there is a God -- the ordered universe and the elegance of life and it's systems, including that of evolutionary biology. But the strongest came when I simply prayed to God to ask Him if a book written about Him was true, and I got my answer. You can do the same if you want, but it does take effort.

To me -- it's a question of innocent until proven guilty -- whether it's Glenn Beck or accusing God of not existing.

You can find out now or after you're dead, when it is too late to act in this life on that knowledge.

I do want to express that I think you're either lying or deceiving yourself when you say that you want to do good by promoting socialism / communism. You see -- you don't want to do good to your fellow man; you want to force me and others to do good to our fellow man.

And there's a tremendous difference between doing good and forcing others to do... Read More good. It is the difference between good and evil, God's plan versus Satan's plan, charity versus tyranny.

Let me say this again -- you don't want to do good in promoting socialism -- you want to force others to do good.

P

More assertion, when proof is required. That is fitting for someone who believes in a religion - which are, after all, the biggest bundle of proof-less assertions known to man.

Hey, since you seem to know more than I do about the inner states of my mind, can I just send you to the psychologist when I need therapy?

BTW, you might want to check out Acts 4 and 5. If you really believe in the tenets of Christianity, and the Bible, you should repent of your capitalist-loving ways, you whited sepulcher, lest God cast you into the fire meant for Satan and his helpers.

I can't believe this shit - I'm more Christian than you are, and I'm an atheist!

N

The united order, or law of consecration, as taught in the Bible, had nothing to do with the government, or force. It was a community of Saints VOLUNTARILY giving of their means according to their means, and receiving according to their needs.

Nowhere does Christ teach that we need force in order to be charitable.

About your inner state of mind... Read More -- are you then asserting that it is right to try to force someone else to do good? Or do you believe that we should only be allowed to judge whether someone's actions are good or even based only on their inner state of mind, and not on the actions themselves?

What happened to the "I don't want to force anyone to do anything statement?"

P

I'm just pointing something out from a book you put a lot of credence in: that the early Christians lived as communists. And that the Bible explains that your god struck dead Ananias (and his wife I think) for lying about some private property so that they could keep it and not share it all with the commune.

In fact, communism is the only form of economic organization the Bible endorses.

N

Again -- no one was forced to join the united order, and Ananias and his wife were stuck down for lying, not for refusing to join the commune.

There were millions of people all around the early Christians that they did not attempt to force in any way to join the united order.

It seems like we keep coming back to the same issue -- you want to force people to do something, but I want people to be free from such tyranny.

P

We keep coming back to you attributing to me beliefs which I do not hold. As I stated before, the difference between us is my preference for greater democracy - democracy that does not stop at, or is not restricted to, voting for political candidates. Whereas you, calling upon your spurious conception of freedom, want to limit democracy to its present boundaries in this country (the only country with which you evince much awareness).

Perhaps you could re-read our discussion, and attempt to finally answer how you are not being hopelessly confused at best and hypocritical at worstfor seeking to "force" me and others to pay for police and fire services for all, for instance, while inveighing against me for wanting to "force" you and others to pay for medical services for all.

N

Do you deny that state welfare restricts freedom in any way?

P

Just as much as state police, state departments of transportation, state food and drug administrations, state postal services, etc., etc., etc., restrict your freedom.

N

So you're saying that because the government restricts freedom in other ways such as by having police (which are actually supposed to protect people's rights), then that justifies restricting people's freedom even more.

At least you've acknowledged that state welfare does lessen individual freedom.

P

It lessons negative freedom, while adding to positive freedom. I.e., it lessons our freedom to do whatever the hell we want, while adding to our freedom to be free from violence (police), free from ignorance of ourselves and others (schools), free from poor or nonexistent roads - that is, the freedom to travel (DOT), free from products that can kill or maim us (FTC), free from monopolies - the existence of which would be a result of negative freedom (DOJ - Antitrust division), etc., etc., etc., down the line through the whole alphabet soup of government agencies you and I are compelled to pay for, yet which you offer not a word of protest against. And why? Because you implicitly recognize that the diminution of negative freedom they cause is more than made up for by the increase in positive freedom they occasion.

Schooling

Students Borrow More Than Ever for College by Anne Marie Chaker

"The new numbers highlight how debt has become commonplace in paying for higher education. Today, two-thirds of college students borrow to pay for college, and their average debt load is $23,186 by the time they graduate, according to an analysis of the government's National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, conducted by financial-aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Only a dozen years earlier, according to the study, 58% of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.

The ripple effects for today's heavily indebted young people are becoming palpable. A growing body of research suggests that tough loan payments are affecting major life decisions by recent graduates, forcing them to put off traditional milestones—from buying a first home to even marriage and having children.

Also, the rising levels of borrowing may ironically be contributing to the accelerating cost of college, say some college-finance experts."

I love how myopic Unitedstatesians blather on and on about non-issues, and avoid the solutions staring them in the face. For instance, ever considered why civilized countries don't have a problem with their young people being saddled with unconscionable amounts of debt for their irresponsible decision to get an education? Think about that one.

Moving on, while many reactionaries' brains flirt with exploding under the unfamiliar strain of original thought, the solution for now is to restore bankruptcy protections to student loans. This will make irresponsible lenders (who like their friends in the subprime mortgage industry sold their dud loans to be packaged into securities and sold to old people's pension funds) learn an important lesson about personal responsibility.

Meanwhile, the borrowers themselves will be chastened with the stigma of bankruptcy and bad credit for years to come - just like any small business owner would be if s/he borrowed money to finance a business expansion that turned sour.

Student debtors need to unite to lobby the government, just like their creditors have done with such amazing success, with Democrats and Republicans alike. Join Student Loan Justice or a similar organization, and let's bring this country's education policy one step away from the edge of total disaster.

PAUL TURKE REPLIED: "[R]eactionaries' brains flirt with exploding under unfamiliar strain of original thought . . ." Witty and nice prose. You should write a novel and pay back your own loans. As for original thoughts, don't be too haughty. The self-righteous whining and begging of intellectually pudgy academics hardly counts as such.

JOSEPHUS P. FRANKS: Shall I provide the address to which to send the advance check?

OMG, OMG, you just used an ad hominem attack!

I may be pudgy, but not intellectually so. Want to discuss the actual solution here, that is, adopting a system similar to those that keep students in civilized countries out of unpayable levels of debt?

RICK STAVELY REPLIED: Blah, blah, blah. Sell the book and the PAC to someone that agrees with you.

Where on the web site is the answer to "Who pays for it when the borrowers don't?" Can I skip paying my taxes and get that forgiven too?

JOSEPHUS P. FRANKS: (laughs) This is more entertaining than I thought it would be. Silly Rick, I don't want to pay for these loans through my taxes any more than I want to pay for them with my paycheck. I don't want you to pay them either. I want the investors in the private loan companies to pay through the loss of their foolish investment. Just like the fools who invested in Countrywide or Enron, I want Sallie Mae's investors to reap the fruit of their thoughtless decision.

Which is precisely what would happen if standard bankruptcy protections were returned to student loans (they were removed by Clinton in '98). The lenders who lent people $60k a year to attend NYU, Brown and the like would get a well-deserved dose of market discipline - as would the borrowers who would be forced into bankruptcy.

This is hardly a liberal/conservative issue. The two poles of this discussion are the rational on one end, and the uninformed on the other.

TOM HELLER REPLIED: "Can I skip paying my taxes and get that forgiven too?"

No, but you CAN declare bankruptcy.

Don't underestimate Josephus' intellectual firepower, Rick.

RICK STAVELY REPLIED: I see. What about the direct student loans the government wrote, or the federal guarantees attached to the student loans written by the banks? How do we deal with those?

JOSEPHUS P. FRANKS: I'd like to renege on the guarantees; because this system was so stupid to begin with I'd want to jettison it as quickly as possible. But our courts wouldn't like that idea too much.

Federal loans tend to be less problematic for borrowers due to the greater deferment/forbearance options, but for many these palliatives just don't work: the underlying problem is that it is pure insanity to saddle college graduates with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. We need to begin immediately a transition to a European higher education funding model. If you are smart enough, you can go to college, and taxpayers will foot the bill. (And happily - I want to live in a country with well-educated people, not so much in a country with lots of subsidized corn producers or military contractor-gougers.) Costs are kept down because the "buyer" in this transaction has all the power in the world. And if the citizenry dislikes how the "buyer" is acting, e.g., being too cheap or too profligate, the citizenry can elect a buyer more to its liking.

And for people who can't test into colleges, but really want to go - let them turn to the private sector for an education and funding. But caveat emptor will be in full effect.

RICK STAVELY REPLIED: O.K., I'll play along, but I have a few more questions:

(1) How exactly does that arragement solve the problems of people like those in this article, given that we agree the federal guarantees can't be ignored? Either the students or the taxpayers must deal with those existing balances, don't they?

(2) Given that we are in the U.S., not Europe or starting with a blank sheet of paper, how do you sell this program to all the parents with kids that are less than stellar students, but who must pay taxes to support state universities and "smarter kids" going to school, particularly those at the lower end of the income spectrum that will inevitably end up financing a "rich kid" going to college at no cost? (I see we agree that going to college is a privilege, not a right.)

(3) How will this strategy fit within the framework of affirmative action and other rules designed to base opportunities on the color of one's skin, age and / or gender rather than purely on ability and potential?

JOSEPHUS P. FRANKS: 1) First the mess must be cleaned up. Borrowers facing undue financial strain from their student loans should renegotiate their debt with their lenders, and be given some federal muscle to sway the banks. (The federal muscle needs to be present to avoid the same problems we've seen with mortgage renegotiation, where recalcitrant banks refuse to work with homeowners to reduce principal, interest and term to make the loan sustainable.) Taxpayers will have to foot some of the bill, but - excluding immigrants for whom this would be a real travesty - they comprised the citizenry that sat by and watched as our higher education system span out of control. So I have little pity for them. (I'd say "us", but I'm young. And have paid attention to this death spiral.)

2) Part and parcel of the European system is progressive taxation, and our adoption of a similar system should - must -retain this. So poor families will pay very little to educate rich kids, while rich families will pay proportionately much more to educate their and others' kids.
By the way, I think going to college is neither privilege (in the sense that word is normally used) nor right. It is something that can be (is possible to be) made available to everyone within our society, if we choose to make that a priority, and take collective action to see it through. I, personally, would want to see that happen, as education is a public good with wonderful, positive and multiplying externalities. But we'd probably have to cut back a bit on our $1 trillion a year military budget, and then we might be invaded and occupied by a Mexican-Cuban-Honduran alliance.

3) Affirmative action on the basis of "race" - I'm unaware of age or gender-based AA - is an attempt to make up for what are largely class disparities. Since "race" correlates pretty closely with class, it is used as a stand-in. But the college level is the wrong time to apply AA, except as a temporary expedient - where "affirmative action" is needed is at the level of wealth disparities that from birth underdevelop young minds.

CINDY FORD REPLIED: EU and UK Uni's are in trouble, they have been ratcheting up the student's portion of payment significantly in the last few years. Lots of backlash and lots of focus on what the students are actually paying for (ie what does the uni have to offer, esp considering the UK system where you teach yourself everything, talk to Prof 1x a month, and then sit for a big test).

JOSEPHUS P. FRANKS: Cindy, true they are in trouble by their own standards - but nothing compared to the tsunami hitting the U.S. The ratcheting up of tuition you mention is correct, but is caused by the triumph of neoliberal ideology in Europe. Given its spectacular failure, as implemented in the global economy over the past few decades, neoliberalism should be on its way out. Like Milton Friedman said, it takes a crisis to hit, and then we pull another economic ideology off the shelf of available ideas...

I'm not familiar with this criticism of the British system - I have friends whose experiences with it led them to think it's brilliant - but for every anecdotal criticism of the British system, I could give you two or three of the US system. I'd only be interested in aggregate data where system-wide comparisons are concerned.

TOM HELLER REPLIED: 2 thumbs up

RICK STAVELY REPLIED: But I would have to declare every year, wouldn't I? How long do you think that could go on?

I stand corrected... we don't agree on much.

First off, despite your earlier post (and laughter), you are now saying you DO want me to pay for some of the debt held by existing students. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that point because I don't want to pay for them.

Secondly, despite socialist / democratic party claims otherwise, we do have a progressive income tax system in this country now, where the top 5% of taxpayers pay 60% of the taxes and 50% of the people pay virtually no income taxes. Despite this progressive system, I think you are unrealistic if you think it would be politically acceptable in this country for kids from families making $100K or more to get a free pass unless they clealry earned it with scholarships because they are among the top of the top performers.

You should run your AA theory by Rev. Al Sharpton. I can hear him now...

As for the proposition overall, I simply do not agree that higher education funding by taxpayers is necessary or desirable in any way.

TOM HELLER REPLIED: Rick -

As to "the math" of 3:1 ratios of out-of-state to in-state tuition, I'd venture you won't find any hard substantiation behind that ratio (and it certainly won't be found in state or university budgets.) That ratio likely just came to pass in one state ("let's only charge our kids/families one-third of 'the cost') and other states emulated it. Politics demanded some differentiation -- and that's been the story ever since.

Besides, if there were truly 'science' behind tuition levels, you'd see far more differentiation in tuition depending on one's chosen major, not a student's in-state status. With flat-rate 'one-size-fits-all' tuitions, the business, engineering and pre-professional programs are likely subsidized by the art history and sociology programs. Shouldn't tuition levels roughly equilibrate the "ROIs" (relative values) of these different courses of study? Wouldn't that happen in a real market?

PAUL TURKE REPLIED: OMG, OMG, you've asserted twice that my country is uncivilized, an ad hominem attack. That aside, I'd like to hear your solution. As many in this forum have already stated, college costs have risen dramatically because of easy access to government sponsored student loans. If you've been in academia, as I have, you'll know that the number one product of universities is an ever growing administration. Administrators and their assistants and assistant's assistants, and so on, ad infinitum, feed off the loans to students which are, in effect, a tax on the rest of us. But, on the other hand, there are worse ways to waste tax dollars. So how do you civilized people solve the problem? Please don't tell me you make education free by having government pay for it, because there is no such thing as free--at least not when the service or good being provided requires someone else to work hard. So, as I see it, this discussion is all about shifting the cost to others, and in spite of the many self-serving and self-righteous rationalizations that I've read, above, the fairest and most honest system I can think of is one in which people take responsibility for themselves. You are right, though, liberty (and libertarianism) is a bit uncivilized--and we like it that way!

JOSEPHUS P. FRANKS: Thanks Paul, for providing an example of why I wrote the "OMG-ad hominem" bit. Because for some reason, right wingers seem incapable of using the term correctly. No, a slight against a country would not qualify as an ad hominem attack, which is an attack against an individual's character or personal trait meant to distract from the discussion of issues at hand. For instance, if I were to call you an "intellectually pudgy academic" right now, that would be an ad hominem attack.

By an extremely restrictive definition, nothing is "free" - even air isn't free, because it's composition is the result of millions of years of planetary evolution during which trillions of organisms paid its cost. Certainly free will is an illusion if you use a very strict definition for free will. But in normal, everyday usage, we consider our police services or our public schools to be free. We believe it when we buy one pizza or bottle of vitamins and get another for "free". Now if you wanted to use a very strict definition of free, as "without any cost whatsoever in any form", then neither our police, public schools, and buy-one-get-one-free deals would properly be considered "free". Likewise, if we use the everyday definition of "free", health care that is paid for on the basis of progressive taxation would be considered "free health care".

And the bit about "shifting the cost to others", in the health care context particularly, is absurd. Health care is all about shifting cost to a large number of people in order to reduce the risk of a massive cost borne by any one person. But here, as I get the closest I'll come to an ad hominem attack, I despair of ever convincing you. If you consider yourself a "libertarian", then you are essentially a poorly-read anarchist. Like anarchists, you dislike large concentrations of power, but unlike anarchists, you lack the intellectual consistency to dislike large concentrations of power when they are not draped with the flag of some nation or other.

That being said, I too wonder why administrators breed like rabbits in the U.S. system. Do you know various European systems well enough to explain how they do a better job at avoiding this fate?

From the Guild Practitioner

ANTHONY D. TAIBI “LEFT” IS NOT ANOTHER WORD FOR “HIP”
______________________
Anthony Taibi is an attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina. He can be reached at anthonytaibi@
gmail.com. This article (c) copyright 1997 by Anthony D. Taibi, all rights reserved


Meet the new boss: same as the old boss.
—The Who

It cannot be seriously disputed that the greatest threats to the lives and communities of ordinary people derive from structural changes in the economy. The globalization of finance and production, new technologies in communications and information, and new methods in the organization of work are producing vast changes in society that will redound to the detriment of most non-elite people, both in America and in the world. Politics that is not concerned with how the economy functions and changes can do little to make real improvements in the lives of working and poor people. Despite this reality, an awful lot of what is called “the left” has had little to say about political economy for about twenty-five years, choosing instead to concern itself with largely cultural, racial and sexual matters.

This is really strange. In the past what defined the left was its stand on economic issues, and although many left institutions were hospitable to cultural and sexual non-conformists, many others were not, and the avant garde could be found across the political spectrum. What differentiated the old left from the old right was economics and its control—not sex, drugs and Rock ’n Roll.

As the century draws to a close, however, free market economic ideology is transcendent across the conventional political spectrum, and it is largely in the realm of socio-cultural ideologies that what we call the “left” and the “right” do battle. I believe that the headline-grabbing conflicts in contemporary American politics should be understood not in terms of left vs. right, but rather in terms of how the aspirations of people who identify with those conventionally denominated groupings are linked to the conflicts between the old elites of the regional, manufacturing economy and the new elites of the emerging global information age. Or, as Tom Frank puts it: “The culture war is a contest largely fought out between square corporate ideologues and
hip corporate ideologues.”

How did this happen? As the drama and passion of the labor struggles of the 1930s faded, desegregation became the focus of social justice activism. This shift had profound consequences for left thought: progress in the arena of the struggle for racial justice seemed to underscore the fading utility of old-style class analysis, which saw the oppression of African Americans only as the most visible indicator of class-based oppression. In both theory and practice, racial justice at that time was better served by the new civil rights liberalism than it was by leftist dreams of some millennial class struggle.

The shift in consciousness and strategies adopted by the civil rights leadership, however, also had the effect of narrowing the scope of the movement’s social critique in exchange for more immediate results: the manifest contradiction between the promise of the American creed of equality and the reality of Jim Crow was resolved with the new liberal paradigms of meritocratic individualism, institutional universalism, and minority rights.

In addition, since the sixties, other forms of oppression, such as those based on gender and sexual orientation, have seemed better explained by civil rights analysis than through older radical left modes of thought, reinforcing the dominance of liberalism and enlarging its constituency. Although much good was accomplished through civil rights, certain aspects
of the liberal worldview that indeed were liberatory at one time are precisely the crucial determinants of both liberalism’s failure and of conservatism’s recent emergence as the new dominant paradigm. Specifically, the following two implicit aspects of the liberal worldview account for both its widespread adoption in the past and for its more recent widespread rejection: first, liberalism’s focus on individual choice, expression, and achievement, and its concomitant lack of attention to structural economic analysis; and, second, liberalism’s promotion of rights that vest in individuals, and corresponding antagonism toward local self-determination, the institutions of civil society, religion, and the family.

As to the first of these, liberalism’s focus on individual choice, expression, and achievement tends to support institutional arrangements that are remarkably consistent with laissez faire economics by rendering opaque the role of class and structural economic power in determining both individual opportunity and the context in which individual choices are made. In its defense of individual lifestyle choices and market outcomes, as long as they are based solely on merit, liberalism is indistinguishable from laissez faire and conflicts with any higher aspirations of social uplift.

The second difficulty with the liberal paradigm is that policies which sought to liberate individuals from stifling, parochial, status-based power resulted in the weakening of the authority of the church, family, and other institutions of civil society, and the assumption of their roles by the institutions of the bureaucratic and professional class, both public and private. Liberalism’s aspect as the liberator of the individual from stifling social structures widened its constituency during the post-war boom because many who were indeed unhappy with parochial social norms were not economically oppressed.

The liberal coalition accordingly expanded to include all of those who wanted the freedom to be cosmopolitan. Today, however, fewer people are looking for cultural liberation and more people are looking for something to hold on to, often finding meaning in family, community, and religion.
Conservatism’s allure at this moment lies in the fact that people need to be connected as much as they need to be free.

In the emergent conservative paradigm, liberal policy responses to identity politics are often framed in terms of their economic effects, and usually found wanting on those terms. This in part explains how conservatives can plausibly argue that liberals are the elites, in spite of liberal protestations that they speak for the oppressed. Conservatives argue that they are the ones who care about the social and economic issues that will ultimately be of real help to the poor. Many conservatives argue that economic growth is the fair and, in the long run, only sustainable social program (i.e., way to help the poor), and that only through laissez faire will economic growth be achieved. Liberal programs, conservatives argue, are nothing more than vehicles by which an elite keeps itself employed in the “helping” professions, as policy elites, educators, health professionals, non-profit organization workers, government bureaucrats and the like. Such liberal professionals, conservatives argue, buy political support by subsidizing social deviance, particularly that social deviance exhibited by the inner city poor.

What most conservatives fail to see, of course, is that their neoclassical economic program has done more to undermine community and civil society than the “nanny” state of the social engineering left ever did. Significantly, we are already seeing tensions within the conservative movement between its commitment to laissez faire economics and the growing recognition that laissez faire driven policies are anything but conservative for culture, religion, the family and community life. In the last presidential election Pat Buchanan often sounded like the only candidate who did not believe that what was good for the rich was necessarily good for the poor. It seems the only way for a socialist presidential candidate to get noticed is to be a National Socialist. Threatened by the appeal of Buchanan’s economic populism, liberal and conservative elites alike simply demonized not only Buchanan, but also his proletarian white supporters.

The economic problem at the heart of the liberal paradigm is that no matter how many social programs we save or expand, no matter how sensitive we all become, and no matter how many glass ceilings are shattered, there are and will continue to be not nearly enough of the sorts of managerial, professional, and technical jobs that liberals focus upon, while economic and cultural changes are eroding the foundations of working class life. Popular culture and the dominant myths of the article-writing class to the contrary notwithstanding, most folks are and will continue to be lower middle class. The optimistic vision of America as the land of upper middle class jobs is false. It is a myth that allows policymakers to ignore the quality of working poor and lower middle class life by holding out the hope that everyone can aspire to be an upper middle class professional. They cannot.

Moreover, conventional success requires people to be driven, selfish, individualistic and manipulative—hardly the moral qualities which the left ought to promote, even indirectly. Incredibly, some continue to suggest that as women, people of color and other members of traditionally excluded groups enter the halls of power, establishment institutions will become kinder and gentler: Margaret Thatcher and Clarence Thomas belie that crazy idea. Thus, for both practical and ethical reasons we must shift our concern from people who want to break through the glass ceiling and instead worry about the folks who clean up broken glass. In other words, we must focus less on social mobility and the diversification of the ruling class, and devote our attention to how to improve the lives of ordinary folk where they are. In their own ways,
grassroots community organizations, whether self consciously “liberal” or “conservative” or “religious” are trying to do just that.

Perhaps it is possible for grassroots working class leftists and grassroots working class conservatives to forge a new politics that joins together global structural economic analysis with a decentralized cooperative vision. This new politics would respect the enduring traditions and systems of meaning that emerge from specific groups of people living and working in particular places, while respecting America’s cosmopolitan diversity. Creating such a coalition is a worthwhile endeavor, in spite of the dangers. The coalitions that comprise our current political spectrum are radically unstable. The Left-liberal-Democratic coalition is an unholy alliance of largely upscale “lifestyle” libertarians and labor union liberals, together with increasingly marginalized African Americans. No less fractured, the Republican-conservative coalition is an unholy alliance of globalist business libertarians and social conservatives.

That so-called “vital center” advocated by President Clinton and others unites rich folks from across the political spectrum to better oppress working folks from across the political spectrum. This brand of “bi-partisanship”—and its parallel form of “internationalism”—must be strenuously resisted. The Wall Street–Hollywood, bi-coastal libertarian elite is interested in
unencumbered sex and the exploitation of “multicultural” global markets, workers and symbols: these people will never give more than lip service and charity to economic justice. On the other hand, I know that many on the left doubt whether our Christian, working class neighbors can learn to be more socially tolerant. As difficult as that might be, it is a hell of a lot more likely than millionaire liberals supporting socialism. And whatever bad one can say about the Promisekeepers, their brand of “racial reconciliation” seems more authentic than a lot of the self-congratulatory bourgeois multiculturalism that goes on in “progressive” social spaces. A new majority coalition must include Reagan Democrats: ordinary, boring, middle class heterosexual Christian white guys.

Every social movement must pick its battles and determine which issues to emphasize and which to soft pedal. The Left could not be doing a better job of alienating ordinary folk if that were our chosen ambition. Instead of focusing on those issues which appeal to ordinary folks—as the left-Democrat coalition did from Roosevelt to Kennedy—we focus on those issues which trouble them. Then we further infuriate them by using undemocratic means like the courts to ensure that they cannot respond.

The Left needs to get off its high horse and stop demonizing social conservatives, and start figuring out how to proselytize them instead. I think that the current boycotts of the Walt Disney Corporation may present just such an opportunity. The Southern Baptist Convention has begun a boycott of Disney because its members object to Disney giving domestic partnership benefits to its relatively well off salaried employees. Many leftists are also boycotting Disney because of the company’s use of sweatshop contractors in Haiti and elsewhere. The use of sweatshop contractors in the Third World has devastated the American textile industry, an industry largely concentrated in the rural South. And the dominant religion among displaced Southern white textile workers is Southern Baptist. Some of the Baptist boycotters would undoubtedly join in the leftist boycott if we would only ask them.

In addition to the joining of boycotts based on very different underlying politics, Marxist theorists and Christian conservatives share more than they know in their understandings of how Disney is destroying children’s imaginations in order to turn them into consumers. We ought to join conservatives in condemning the degradation of culture into entertainment, but promote recognition that these problems are more the product of capitalism than they are of liberal permissiveness.

As the square old 1950s national industrial capitalist elite dies off and is replaced by the hip multicultural global postmodern capitalist elite it will perhaps become more clear that cultural liberation is no help for structural economic oppression. The capitalist elite has always turned liberatory impulses opposed to established authority and culture to its own advantage.

Thus, we must ask of leftist intellectuals: Which side are you on? Do you stand on your class interest as lawyers, teachers, policy analysts, and journalists. Or do you stand with the working class. And if “left” is not just another word for “hip” then we better learn to broaden our cultural horizons to include those we would revile as narrow.

Book revew: The Corrections

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I have the feeling that if I loved novels, I would have loved this book. I really liked it though.

Here are some of my favorite parts, insights into:

Depression: "A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant."

The stupidity and rapacity of the investor class, that is, the world's ruling class: "Gitanas had created a satiric Web page offering DEMOCRACY FOR PROFIT: BUY A PIECE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY... Visitors to the site were invited to send cash to the erstwhile VIPPPAKJRIINPB17 - 'one of Lithuania's most venerable political parties,' the 'cornerstone' of the country's governing coalition for 'three of the last seven years,' the leading vote-getter in the April 1993 general election, and now a 'Western-leaning pro-business party' reorganized as the 'Free Market Party Company.' Gitanas's Web site promised that, as soon as the Free Market Party Company had bought enough votes to win a national election, its foreign investors would not only become 'equity shareholders' in Lithuania Incorporated (a 'for-profit nation state') but would also be rewarded, in proportion to the size of their investment, with personalized memorials to their 'heroic contribution' to the 'market liberation' of the country. By sending just $100, for example, an American investor could have a street in Vilnius ('no less than two hundred meters in length') named after him; for $5,000 the Free Market Party Company would hang a portrait of the investor ('minimum size 60 cm x 80 cm; includes ornate gilt frame') in the Gallery of National Heroes at the historic Slapeliai House; for $25,000 the investor would be awarded perpetual title to an eponymous town 'of no fewer than 5,000 souls' and be granted a 'modern, hygienic form of droit du seigneur' that met 'most of' the guidelines established by the Third International Conference on Human Rights."

Rationalizations: "She reasoned that if the problem in the dining room was her responsibility then she was horrendously derelict in not resolving it, and a loving mother could never be so derelict, and she was a loving mother, so the responsibility must not have been hers.

The travails of seduction: "For the next two hours D mainly paid attention to her hand, which she'd laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of R's. The hand wasn't comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn't want to give up hard-won territory."

Book review: Sex Matters

Sex Matters by Osho

Interesting collection of speeches or essays themed around Osho's interpretation of the meaning of sex, and how most human societies and religions have twisted and mutilated it to our detriment.

"It is sexual energy that transforms into love. But everyone is against it, is inimical to it. Your so-called good people are against it. And this opposition has not allowed the seed even to sprout. It has destroyed the palace of love at its foundation, on the very first step. The coal never becomes a diamond because the acceptance that is needed for its evolution, for its process of transformation, is out of the question."

Put in another way - and there is a lot of repetition in this book - "[a]ll life, all expression, all flowering is basically sex energy. And it is against this sex energy that religions and cultures are pouring poison into the minds of human beings. They are trying to engage human beings in a fight against it. They have entangled people in this battle against their own basic energy, so they have become wretched, pathetic, devoid of love, false, nobodies."

But the danger of the suppression of sex is not, in Osho's view, limited to the disastrous consequence of the suppression and inhibition of love. The suppression of sex also means the promotion of violence, an inverse relationship that has also been noted by anthropologists studying cultures with different attitudes towards sex and violence. "Restrained people are very dangerous because a live volcano boils inside them, and only outwardly are they rigid and full of control. Please remember, anything that is controlled requires so much effort and energy that the restraint cannot be maintained the whole time. You will have to relax sometime; you will have to rest sometime. ... If it needs effort, it will also need rest. And so, the more self-controlled a saint is, the more dangerous he is - because the need to relax this restraint will come. In twenty-four hours of self-control, one will have to relax for an hour or two, and during this period there will be such an upsurge of suppressed 'sins' that he will find himself in the midst of hell."

"This is the reason the animal in us erupts at the slightest opportunity. At the time of the India and Pakistan partition, we saw how the animal lurks beneath the clothing of human beings. We came to know what the people who pray in the mosques and recite the Gita in the temples are capable of. They can loot, they can slaughter, they can rape, they can do anything. The very people who were always seen praying in the temples and mosques were now seen raping in the streets. What happened to them? ...Our life energy has only one natural but animal outlet, and that outlet is sex. Closing that channel creates problems."

But what is most important to Osho about sex is that it is the first experience humans ever had with meditation - itself the key to a peaceful, content life. "[M]an had his first glimpses of awakening, of meditation, in moments of lovemaking - nowhere else. It was only in moments of lovemaking that human beings realized for the first time that so much bliss is possible. Those who meditated on this truth, those who reflected deeply on the phenomenon of sex, of lovemaking, saw that in moments of lovemaking, at the climax, the mind becomes empty of thoughts. For a moment all thoughts disappear. And this emptiness of the mind, this disappearance of thoughts, brings a showering of blessings. They discovered the secret."

In Chan/Son/Thien/Zen Buddhism, the goal is a state of meditation-induced "no-mind", where the mind's chatter is quiet and one experiences experience without distraction. Osho's point is that during orgasm too, all the mind's chatter disappears and one experiences no-mind - only without the trouble of sitting uncomfortably for hours on end.

Sex brings with it the two most important features of religious experience: egolessness and timelessness. "[I]n the moment of orgasm the ego vanishes and egolessness emerges. For a moment there is no ego; for a moment, no trace even of 'I am.' ... In the experience of enlightenment, there is no time at all. It is beyond time. There is no past, no future; there is only the present. This is the second thing that happens in the experience of sex - there is no past, no future; time also vanishes for a moment."

With such an easy, simple and immensely pleasurable means of attaining religious enlightenment at hand, it is clear to see why religions would be violently jealous. After all, it is they that are supposed to hold the key to enlightenment; their rites that offer transcendence; their donation boxes through which paradise is to be achieved. Therefore, it is unsurprising that religions tend to be anti-sex, trapping its so-called "proper" exercise within the cage of marriage; in a species for whom polygamy, not monogamy, is natural (or so all evidence points to).

"Religions are against sex because down the centuries they have come to know that sex is the most enjoyable thing for man, so they poison his joy. Once you poison his joy and you put this idea in his mind that something is wrong in sex - it is sin - then he will never be able to enjoy it, and if he cannot enjoy it, then his energies will start moving in other directions. He will become more ambitious. ... Ambition is sex energy diverted, and the society diverts you. You ask, 'Why are all the religions against sex?' They are against sex because that is the only way to make you unhappy, guilty, afraid. Once you are afraid, you can be manipulated. Remember this fundamental rule: Make a person afraid if you want to dominate him." This is a not an unfamiliar lesson to Unitedstatesians during the "War on Terror," Germans and Japanese during World War II, Chileans during Pinochet's rule, etc., etc.

The way that religions have forced sexuality into the domain of morality - which every culture in the world has recognized to be exhausted by the principle of "treat others as you would like them to treat you" - has been a tremendous tragedy. "[T]he very combination of sex and morality has poisoned the whole past of morality. Morality became so much sex-oriented that it lost all other dimensions, which are far more important. Sex should not really be so much of a concern for moral thinking. ... But sex and morality became almost synonymous in the past; sex became overpowering, overwhelming. So whenever you say somebody is immoral you simply mean that something is wrong with his sexual life. And when you say somebody is a very moral person, all that you mean is that he follows the rules of sexuality laid down by the society in which he lives. Morality became one-dimensional; it has not been good. ... [Sexuality] should not be a concern of the society at all. Unless somebody interferes in somebody else's life - imposes himself, forces somebody, is violent, violates somebody's life, then only should society come in. Otherwise there is no problem; it should not be any concern at all."

The imposition of a regime of monogamy has been poisonous to humanity because "[w]e have created a monogamous mind, not loving. That's why there are so many wars, so much cruelty, so much violence, in many, many names - religion, politics, ideology. Any nonsense will do as long as you find something to be violent about. And then see how people become sharp: their eyes look brilliant when there is war, when everyone is just freed from the taboo against killing. Then you can kill anybody. So you feel more joy when you kill somebody - you never feel joy when you love someone. ... Why? Our capacity to love has atrophied. A child is capable of loving anyone. A child is born to love the whole world, a child is born to love everything, a child is born to love the whole universe... if a person loves many people, then there is no reason to marry someone only because of love, because he can love many people without marriage, so there is no reason. We have forced everyone to go into marriage because of love. Because you cannot love outside it, so we have unnecessarily forced love and marriage to be together. Marriage is for deeper things - for intimacy, for a communion, to do something that cannot be done alone, that can be done together, that needs a togetherness, a deep togetherness."

"Sex has nothing to do with jealousy, anger, and possessiveness. But man's mind has been conditioned in such a way by the vested interests that they have exploited the very source of his life energy - sex - to fulfill their own interests. For example, man is naturally polygamous, and by man I don't mean only men but women too. Human beings are polygamous, but all the societies have forced monogamy. Now that creates the trouble. ... If society were run by intelligent people - not by people who want to exploit you, but by people who want to fulfill your nature to its uttermost capacity - there would be no jealousy. The wife would understand that once in a while the husband needs some other woman, 'just the way I need some other man.' ... What is wrong if you play tennis with one partner today, another partner another day? Is there any jealousy? There is no question of jealousy. And it is nothing more than tennis - two energies meeting and merging. And after the pill, the basic argument of all the religions is completely outdated."

"When there is no jealousy there is no anger, and all the qualities that I speak of will come automatically. A woman who gives you freedom, a man who never tries to possess you - you are allowed to move in the world according to your own wishes - do you think friendship will not arise between these two persons? A man giving freedom to the wife, a wife giving freedom tot he husband - there is bound to be great friendship, great intimacy. ... But the societies of the past never wanted this to happen. They wanted people to remain bored: tie one woman to one man forever, and you have started a pilgrimage to the ultimate boredom. These bored people, suffering, cannot revolt. ... [T]he vested interests don't want you to be intelligent, to be rich in experience, to reach to the climax of your potential, because that is dangerous to them. You can remain slaves only if you are poor in experience in intelligence. You can remain slaves only if you are a henpecked husband. ... And you have been kept poor psychologically, spiritually, physically, so that a few people can become presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, a few people can become popes, or Ayatollah Khomeini. Just for a few people the whole of humanity is sacrificed!"

As comedian Bill Hicks observed about a society in which all are raised to love each other, sexually if desired, sans distinctions and separations and without regard to people having what amount to sexual property interests in each other: "Now if that's not a danger to society! I mean, how are we gonna keep building nuclear weapons, you know what I mean? What's gonna happen to the arms industry once we realize that we're all one? It's gonna fuck up the economy!" Osho makes much the same point: "If society is allowed total freedom about joy, nobody will be destructive. People who can love beautifully are never destructive. And people who can love beautifully and have the joy of life will not be competitive either. These are the problems. ... Now this whole society depends on one thing, and that is sex repression. Otherwise the economy will be destroyed, sabotaged. War will disappear and with it the whole war machinery; politics will become meaningless and the politician will no longer be important. Money will not have value if people are allowed to love. Because they are not allowed to love, money becomes the substitute, money becomes their love. So there is a subtle strategy. Sex has to be repressed, otherwise this whole structure of the society will fall immediately."

And what a loss that would be!

Book review: Why I Am Not a Hindu

"Why I Am Not a Hindu" by Kancha Ilaiah

"Hinduism has never been a humane philosophy. It is the most brutal religious school that the history of religions has witnessed. The Dalitbahujan castes of India are the living evidence of its brutality."

The author, Kancha Ilaiah, is a "Dalitbahujan", a group which includes India's lower castes like farmers and the "untouchables". Ilaiah (sounds like "Isaiah") refuses to lump Dalitbahujans in with Hindus: "What do we, the lower [castes, or Dalitbahujans], have to do with Hinduism ...? [The Dalitbahujans of India] have never heard the word 'Hindu' - not as a word, nor as the name of a culture, nor as the name of a religion in our early childhood days. We heard about the Turukoollu (Muslims), we heard about Kirastaanapoollu (Christians), we heard about Baapanoollu (Brahmins) [the priestly caste] and Koomatoollu (Baniyas) [the merchant class] spoken of as people who were different from us. Among these four categories, the most different were the [Brahmins and the Baniyas]. There are at least some aspects of life common to us and the [Muslims and Christians]. We all eat meat, we all touch each other. With the [Muslims], we shared several other cultural relations. We both celebrated the Peerila festival. Many [Muslims] came with us to the fields. The only people with whom we had no relations, whatsoever, were the [Brahmins and Baniyas]. But today we are suddenly being told that we have a common religious and cultural relationship with the [Brahmins and Baniyas]. This is not merely surprising; it is shocking."

So begins Ilaiah's broadside against Hinduism and "Hindutva" or Hindu-ness, the ideology of the Hindu right. In the book, he argues that Hinduism, with its focus on upper caste gods, values, and culture, is a patriarchal and fascist religion and worldview. Furthermore, Hinduism should be considered the sole preserve of the upper castes - despite efforts by the Hindu right to draw the Dalitbahujan masses into the Hindu fold (in a subservient position of course) to increase their numbers and gain unity and strength in the fight against Muslims and Christians. Ilaiah identifies the Hindus as the ancestors of the Aryan tribes who were supposed to have invaded the subcontinent from the north a few thousand years ago, and the Dalitbahujans as the ancestors of the indigenous peoples of the subcontinent prior to the Aryan invasion. (He even attempts to explain Hindu sexism by proffering literary evidence tending to show how "all women, including Brahmin women, were treated in the same demeaning way because they were seen to share the same genealogical origins... because most of the ancient Aryan invaders were men and they must have married the native Sudra-Dravid women. They must have had sex with such women and must have treated them as the equivalent to Sudra slaves.")

Ilaiah explains that India today is in the sad state it is in owing to Hinduism and Hindus - meaning, again, the upper castes - which are still the ruling elites in India. During British occupation upper caste Indians were made into a comprador class: a segment of an occupied society that receives benefits and rewards from the occupier in return for collaboration. By the time India gained independence from Britain, "an all-India 'upper' caste elite - the new bhadralok (the 'upper' caste combine) - was ready to take over the whole range of post-colonial political institutions... each institution was made the preserve of the 'upper' caste forces, with Brahmins being in the lead in many of [them]." Even the anti-colonial, nationalist movements were hegemonized by the Brahmins and their upper caste allies, a process which was made possible "because the British colonialists themselves saw a possibility of manipulation of institutions, parties and organizations if they remained in the hands of the so-called upper castes... Consciously or unconsciously, the British themselves helped to construct a 'brahminical meritocracy' that came to power in post-Independence India."

"In post-colonial India, in the name of Congress [Party] democratic rule, the Hindus came to power both at Delhi and at the provincial headquarters. Parliamentary democracy in essence became brahminical democracy. Within no time the colonial bureaucracy was transformed into a brahminical bureaucracy. The same brahminical forces transformed themselves to suit an emerging global capitalism. They recast their Sanskritized life-style to anglicized life-styles, reshaping themselves, to live a semi-capitalist (and at the same time brahminical) life. Their anglicization did not undermine their casteized authoritarianism. All apex power centres in the country were brahminized and the power of the bureaucracy greatly extended. Because of their anglicization quite a few of them were integrated into the global techno-economic market. Such top brahminical elites were basically unconcerned with the development of the rural economy because it would result in changing the conditions of the Dalitbahujan masses and thus new social forces might emerge. Thus the anglicized brahminical class also became an anti-development social force."

Even the Indian Communist Party did not escape upper caste domination. "Notionally the Communist leadership was trying to portray itself as an integral part of the masses and to stress that it was no different from the people. But in reality the Dalitbahujan masses remained distinctly different in three ways: (i) the Communist leadership came from the 'upper' caste - mainly from Brahmins; (ii) they remained Hindu in day-to-day life-styles; and (iii) by and large the masses were economically poor but the leaders came from relatively wealthy backgrounds. The masses came from Dalitbahujan castes, and these castes never found an equal place in the leadership structures. Even in states like Andrhra Pradesh and Kerala, where non-Brahmin movements were strong enough to influence the society, the pattern held good... All over the country, the Brahmin population has become leaders in all spheres of socio-political life. They never remained part of the masses. Thus even the Communist movement started functioning in two separate camps - the 'upper' caste leader camp and the Dalitbahujan cadre camp."

"What Hinduism has done is that through manipulative hierarchization, even in the socialist era, it has retained its hegemony over the managerial posts in the urban centres. In every industry the working masses are Dalitbahujans whose notions of life and work are non-Hinduistic [that is, they value labor and practical knowledge over leisure and religious knowledge], whereas, the entrepreneurs and managers of the factories - the directors, supervisors, engineers - are Brahmin, Baniya or Neo-Kshatriya [the warrior caste]. As a result, there is a total cultural divide between the managerial class and the working class. If some factory workers starve or if workers get injured or die because of an accident, the managers do not feel for them because there is no social relationship between them. They are separated not only by class but also by caste. Thus the worker's suffering or death is seen as that of the Other." Hence India's putrid wealth divide: divisions were first cut into society by caste, and now have been cemented by class.

...

As an interesting aside, Ilaiah argues that the "persistent theory that human beings are by nature, selfish or iniquitous or the scope for selfishness is removed only when inequality is reduced (as was done in some of the former socialist systems) and its obverse: the theory that human systems do not survive if inequalities are totally removed, both these theories can be disproved by any systematic study of Dalitwaadas [Dalitbahujan communities], where there is no negative cut-throat competition and no withdrawing into lethargy."

Book review: The Rise of China and the Demise of the World Capitalist Economy

I had hoped this would be a hopeful book somehow laying out a convincing argument that China's rise will eclipse the disintegrating international capitalist economy and usher in a new world order focused on meeting human needs in an environmentally sustainable manner. Sadly, that is not this book's argument.

...

"Chinese socialism was the historical product of a great revolution, which was based on the broad mobilization and support of the workers and peasants comprising the great majority of the population. As a result, it would necessarily reflect the interests and aspirations of ordinary working people. On the other hand, China remained a part of the capitalist world-economy, and was under constant and instance pressure of military and economic competition against other big powers. To mobilize resources for capital accumulation, surplus product had to be extracted from the workers and peasants and concentrated in the hands of the state. This in turn created opportunities for the bureaucratic and technocratic elites to make use of their control over the surplus product to advance their individual power and interests rather than the collective interest of the working people. This was the basic historical contradiction that confronted Chinese socialism as well as other socialist states in the twentieth century."

The author, Minqi Li, was a member of the student dissident movement of the 80s in China. He describes the milieu during which he studied neoclassical economics at Beijing University: "The 1980s was a decade of political and intellectual excitement in China. Despite some half-hearted official restrictions, large sections of the Chinese intelligentsia were politically active and were able to push for successive waves of the so-called 'emancipation of ideas' (jiefang sixiang). The intellectual critique of the already existing Chinese socialism at first took place largely within a Marxist discourse. Dissident intellectuals called for more democracy without questioning the legitimacy of the Chinese Revolution or the economic institutions of socialism.

After 1985, however, economic reform moved increasingly in the direction of the free market. Corruption increased and many among the bureaucratic elites became the earliest big capitalists. Meanwhile, among the intellectuals, there was a sharp turn to the right... The politically active intellectuals no longer borrowed discourse from Marxism. Instead, western classical liberalism and neoliberal economics, as represented by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, had become the new, fashionable ideology."

A turn towards neoliberalism had, by the 1980s, been made possible by decades of Maoist development policy, which had developed "the necessary industrial and technological infrastructure [allowing China to] become a major player in the global capitalist economy." Li does a good job explaining the capitalist world-system, according to Immanuel Wallerstein's formulation, with its separation into core, semi-peripheral and peripheral states. The international division of labor has core states, like the U.S. and Japan, performing cutting-edge production requiring massive investment and organization, and which offer the greatest profit margins; the semi-peripheral states, like South Korea and most recently China, performing second-generation production that was cutting edge decades ago but which still offer substantial profits; and the peripheral states, like Angola and Bangladesh, which perform low value-added production like raw material exports and low-tech manufacturing.

Li argues that China's move from peripheral to semi-peripheral status (as China now produces all sorts of high- and low-tech products for the core states) signals trouble for the capitalist world-system: "the current 'rise of China' as well as the 'rise of India,' could be the signal that the capitalist world-economy is calling upon its last strategic reserves (such as China, India, the remaining resources, and the remaining space for pollution) to make one more attempt to jump-start global accumulation... The current global development is likely to suggest that several secular trends, which result from the inherent laws of motion of the existing world-system, are now reaching their historical limits."

Why? Because the capitalist world-system relies on strategic reserves of labor that can be called upon when existing labor forces begin to successfully fight for higher wages. Since the system needs high profit margins to reproduce itself via investment, and since high wages put pressure on profit margins, the capitalist world-system needs countries like China and India to turn to for their cheap labor forces once wage costs, or lack of effective demand (in other words, low wages that reduce a market's buying power) begin to threaten profitability. But the very process of exploiting labor in China - building factories and creating an urban working class, moving China from peripheral to semi-peripheral status - threatens to undermine the ability to exploit such labor in the future. Li explains: "To the extent that the non-core states have lower levels of proletarianization, workers tend to be less educated, less effectively organized, and under constant pressure to compete against a large rural reserve army [of laborers]. The workers in these states, therefore, tend to have much lower bargaining power and receive significantly lower real wages. The low real wages in the periphery and semi-periphery make it possible for the world surplus value to be concentrated in the core and help to keep down system-wide wage costs. However, in the long run, the development of the capitalist world-economy has been associated with the progressive urbanization of the labor force. After some initial disorientation, urbanized workers have invariably struggled for higher degrees of organization and extension of their economic, social and political rights. Their struggles have led to growing degrees of proletarianization within the capitalist world economy." (emphasis added)

This spells trouble for the world-system, since as production costs increase in China as workers successfully fight for higher wages, there will be few alternative states for producers to turn to for cheap, educated labor and efficient infrastructure. Also, China's ever-increasing contribution to environmental degradation threatens to undermine the world economy through destruction of the natural environment of which it is a part.

Li's analysis of economic - and, more depressingly, ecological trends - leads to the following conclusion: "With the decline of the US hegemony (reflected by its ever-declining ability and willingness to pursue the system's long-term, common interest), no other state is in a position to replace the US and provide effective leadership for the system. China and every other potential hegemonic candidate all suffer from insurmountable contradictions and weaknesses. None has the ability to offer 'system-level solutions' to 'system-level problems.' Either the existing world-system has exhausted its historical space for potential new leadership and therefore is doomed to systemic disintegration, or the new leadership will have to assume the form of an alliance of multiple continent-sized states, which will then become a world-government and therefore bring the existing world-system to an end.

The capitalist world-economy rests upon the ceaseless expansion of material production and consumption, which is fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of ecological sustainability. Depletion of material resources and pollution of the earth's ecological system have now risen to the point that the ecological system is on the verge of collapse and the future survival of humanity and human civilization is at stake.

To summarize, multiple economic, social, geopolitical, and ecological forces are now converging towards the final demise of the existing world-system, that is, the capitalist world economy."

What comes next could be a rational world-system of production geared towards first fulfilling human needs, then wants, in an ecologically-sustainable manner. But while the current system's demise is assured, there is no guarantee of the character of its replacement, and, at this point, very little likelihood it will resemble the description above.